Rats didn’t desert the Titanic as quickly as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s top aides have started fleeing City Hall. But they likely had the same reason.
In just the past two days, de Blasio has lost his chief counsel, his social media director (after just eight weeks) and now two of his top environmental officials, Emily Lloyd and Nilda Mesa.
Last month also saw the exit of his press secretary, Karen Hinton.
Granted, some staff turnover is inevitable. But City Hall’s revolving door is now spinning at breakneck speed.
Maya Willey, the mayor’s chief lawyer, reportedly had been looking to leave for months, despite heated denials from the mayor’s office.
She’s the one who came up with that notorious “agents of the city” designation to justify withholding de Blasio’s emails with certain key lobbyists and consultants.
Now she’ll replace Richard Emery, who quit under pressure as head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board — raising new questions about the board’s independence and impartiality.
But she’s not the first mayoral aide to pull up stakes, only to land a cushy post elsewhere. Homeless Services chief Gilbert Taylor got the ax last December in the wake of the seen-on-every-street-corner failure of the mayor’s homeless policies — but got to keep his $220K salary as a “consultant” and later scored a job as a Family Court judge.
Stacy Cumberbatch, whose agency OK’d the dubious deal that let a Lower East Side nursing home be flipped for luxury condos, escaped to a high-paying hospitals job.
Maybe the mayor’s now-departed web czar, Scott Kleinberg, was on to something when he quit with a Facebook rant about “political hacks” and “a boss who just couldn’t get it.”
Because what we’re seeing is an administration awash in mismanagement, micro-management and just plain chaos. So much so that even Bill de Blasio’s loyalists are throwing in the towel.